


fading however hard

by aliferlia



Category: Tokyo Babylon
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 18:55:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliferlia/pseuds/aliferlia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"All dreams are important, and hatsuyume is extremely important! The first dream of the New Year is like a prophecy your mind tells itself!" Hokuto and Subaru eat ice cream and discuss dreams on the first day of 1990. CLAMP Secret Santa gift for tachiagare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fading however hard

**Author's Note:**

> CLAMP Secret Santa 2013 gift for [tachiagare](http://tachiagare.tumblr.com/)! I chose to fill the request "Subaru and Hokuto. Nothing shippy, just break my heart please?" I'm sorry this is short and kind of plotless, but I hope it achieves at least a little heartbreak! Happy New Year!
> 
> (Title taken from "Night Bus" by Lucy Rose.)

‘Well, _I_ think it means that you’ll become fabulously wealthy and buy a yacht and sail around the world wearing sunglasses and linen suits,’ Hokuto was saying. ‘Won’t that be lovely?’

‘But I don’t like boats,’ Subaru protested, weakly. ‘Anyway, it was only a dream, so -’

‘Only a dream! _Only a dream_?’ Hokuto demanded, stamping her foot. ‘ _All_ dreams are important, and hatsuyume is _extremely_ important! The first dream of the New Year is like a prophecy your mind tells itself! How else are you going to know what the year will bring?’ To prove her point, she wildly about herself: said, ‘Ooh, look! Someone’s actually still selling ice cream! Finally, business owners with _sense_!’ and bounded away, dodging oncomers all down the busy pavement.

Subaru followed slowly behind, murmuring apologies to startled pedestrians as necessary. All around him, the rainy city towered up and up out of the mist into the low grey clouds, mirrored walls and glassy fixtures reflecting a mess of light, red and gold and candleheart blue, neon and sodium all bleared like raindrops on a windowpane. It was late in the day, and the air was very still: the howling gale of the afternoon had dropped away completely, leaving behind only the muffled roar of the rainsodden streets. Droplets clung close to the branches of every bare tree, and from close by came the grey cardboard scent of cigarette smoke. He huddled down deeper into his scarf.

‘Maybe you just could wait and see?’ he suggested, catching up to her outside a small drop-hatch street stall just as she scooped her change into her (small, orange, glittery) purse: set it down on the counter a moment to accept two complex cones from the rather beleaguered-looking shop-owner. Subaru waved at him apologetically. ‘That way it would be like a nice surprise.’

‘Impossible! For the modern woman, time is of the essence! None of this waiting around to see how things are going to turn out - you have to seize your future firmly and go out and get it! It’s _vital_ to analyse your first dream with _pinpoint precision_ so that you’ll know exactly how your fortunes will turn out! Which brings me to my next point!’ She shoved a cone into his gloved hand. ‘Eat.’

Because she was Hokuto, she had ordered for herself a downright precarious pillar of ice cream, six scoops or more and each a different flavour, all piled via some small architectural miracle into a double-sized sugar-cone. Similarly, because she was Hokuto, she had known perfectly well to order for Subaru only a single small and careful scoop of matcha, from which he obediently took a single small and careful bite. She skipped away, brown tartan coat flaring wildly, butterfly tights glittering in the low misty sodium glare of the streetlights, breath spilling warm and living and grey from her mouth together with a laugh. Subaru followed, concentrating hard on each mouthful of his cone, so as to make it last as long as possible. He took ice cream very seriously.

‘We probably shouldn’t eat ice cream while it’s still this cold,’ he ventured, then had to act fast to chase a rogue drip down the side of his cone. ‘Anyway, won’t you get sick if you have that much?’

‘Perhaps that’s my plan,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘Come down with a terrible case of ice cream-induced flu, and have my ever-so-pious and admirably devoted baby brother skip work for a few days to slave away making certain that I’m pampered until I recover. Pretty smart, isn’t it?’ She gave a triumphant cackle: got to the bottom of the vanilla scoop, began investigating the strawberry. ‘Anyway, tell me what happened after you finished fighting the penguin on the waterslide?’

Subaru thought about it. ‘We ended up in the park?’ he tried. It had started out fun, at least as dreams about penguins went, but ended up as something of a nightmare: he had the feeling that he had had it before and forgotten it each time, waking always with a horrible hollow sense of unease. ‘I think? Ueno Park? I really can’t remember.’ He concentrated very hard: took another bite of ice cream to aid his memory. ‘There were penguins _everywhere_ ,’ he remarked, fretfully. ‘They wanted me to make them hats, but I didn’t know how. They were so sad about it.’

‘Probably it means that you’re going to become a penguin trainer,’ Hokuto advised him, through a mouthful of pink cream and rainbow sprinkles: and, skipping ahead a few steps, flung her arms out to twirl. Her exuberance came at the cost of her topmost scoop of her ice cream, which departed its kind and flopped mournfully onto the pavement. ‘No! Not the strawberry!’ she wailed. ‘Mint hadn’t even confessed her love for you yet, Strawberry! And you hadn’t told Chocolate about your fling with Matcha! What will become of your clandestine lovechild?’

Subaru caught up to her, patiently proffered his own cone. ‘What flavour was the lovechild?’ he asked, because he knew that that was the sort of question she liked to be asked.

‘I suppose I’ll never know,’ she said, heaving a wonderfully melodramatic sigh, and took a bite of his ice cream: shoved her free hand disconsolately into a pocket. ‘Strawberry took the secret to her pavementy grave.’ Here she frowned: dug into both her pockets, checked her bag, pulled a face. ‘ _And_ I’ve gone and lost my purse. Do you think I dropped it somewhere?’

‘You might have - oh, do you want me to go and check whether you left it at the shop?’ And then, when she began to protest, handed

‘You guard the ice cream,’ he said. ‘I won’t be a moment, promise!’

The shop-owner had already started down the street after them by the time Subaru, puffing and panting, had jogged back to the shop, and so it was with a red-faced puff of thanks that he clutched at the wallet and apologised for the trouble. The walk back through the thick mist was not more than two streets, and yet he dragged his feet, giving himself time to catch his breath. The shop windows all about were warmly lit, still richly-decked with Christmas ornaments and hung with flyers wishing their patrons a prosperous new year, and yet he could not shake the remembered unhappiness of his dream. There had been penguins and parks and waterslides to begin with, and it had all been great fun: but then there had been a tree made all of light, horrible for something so lovely, and a sensation of blood dripping hot down his hand, and a faceless thing like a man lurking just at the corner of his eye.

He shook himself, feeling silly, and clutched hard at the purse: stared resolutely at the glittery orange frog on the front. More and more, recently, he had begun to know strange aches of melancholy that overtook him in the middle of perfectly ordinary activities like catching a train or going back for a misplaced wallet, little twinges of nostalgia for moments that had not yet been lost. It was nameless and causeless, as though he were already grieving someone he had not met. He saw, sometimes, blood on a cold pavement in place of spilled sugar, and flowers like rain coming down hard all around. He looked up and up into the imminent sky, breathed in deeply, smelling smoke and the sweetness of rain. He loved this city, but he was glad that he did not have to live in it alone. Huddling closer into his coat, he strode onward into the stillness of the evening. That heavy grey scent of cigarette smoke lingered still, thick in the back of his throat as sorrow.

He found Hokuto a few blocks from where he had left her, sitting alone on a bench under a leafless tree, coat draped about her shoulders, hands empty: and her eyes fixed on some far imagined future he could not see. She was so still and so quiet, her face so pale and haggard in the winter cold, that she might almost have been a ghost herself. He had upon occasion encountered spirits so lonely and so tired, who had spent so many years yearning alone for sleep, that they had lost all their grief and all their rage, and were content to wait quietly in the homes they had lost, insane but peaceful with it. He feared them above all else.

‘Hokuto-chan?’ he asked, quietly, and then, when she made no sound: ‘Hokuto-chan!’

She started: looked to him with something like dismay. She felt it, too, he supposed, sometimes, however hard she might try not to show it. She fought against it with all her strength, and so he resolved to do likewise. Hurrying to her, he put his face against her shoulder and his arms around her waist: beamed when she gave a small surprised laugh and cuddled in close. He slipped the purse back into her pocket. She was warm and solid, and smelled very comfortingly of herself, all soap and clean cotton and cinnamon. He was never sad around her.

‘Hello, baby brother,’ she said, softly, into his hair. ‘I finished your ice cream.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘And thank you for fetching my purse for me.’

‘I don’t mind.’

She laughed helplessly, kissed the top of his forehead. ‘You’re too good for this world,’ she told him. ‘Always making the rest of us look bad, that’s what you’re up to.’

‘ _You’re_ too good,’ he corrected her, and then, growing embarrassed, added, ‘What was your dream? For the New Year, I mean. What did you see?’ When she made no response, he tried, ‘Are you going to - to seize it firmly, and, and go out and get it?’

Still she hesitated. ‘I didn’t dream at all,’ she said, finally, and although her tone was light, he could hear, quite clearly, how she swallowed before adding, ‘Maybe it means I don’t have a future. Wouldn’t that be creepy? Like the plot of a horror movie.’

Subaru shook his head against her shoulder. He felt very small and very young, suddenly, far too young to be so isolated, but he did not mind, not so long as he could sleep on her shoulder. If he had her to tell him stories about the scandalous romances ice cream and invent futures, then surely he could stand against winter in the grey city - could stand against the looming uncertainty of any future - and remain unafraid. He opened his eyes: looked up to see her grinning down at him, her hair all lit with gold in the glow from the streetlamps, her eyes soft and very fond.

‘You do have a future,’ he said, firmly. ‘You have a future on the yacht, in a huge floppy hat, wearing the prettiest dress in the whole world. You’ll have pet penguins and a million different ice cream flavours. I’ll be the penguin-trainer and make them do tricks.’

She laughed, delighted. ‘Of course you will,’ she said. ‘And I’ll sew hats for them, so that they won’t be sad. Don’t you think that’s a good idea? I do. I think it’ll be perfect.’

Halfway across the city, in a very dark room in a very dark house, a tall man in a black coat wiped blood from his hand and lit a cigarette. He found himself possessed, for no clear reason, by a sense of great serenity. He had the feeling that it was going to be a good year.


End file.
